※ [本文轉錄自 NTU05DFLL 看板] 作者: spanisheyes (hazel) 看板: NTU05DFLL 標題: [公告] T. J. Wooler's "Black Dwarf" 時間: Thu Dec 11 23:07:57 2008 國立臺灣大學外國語文學系學術演講 DFLL Faculty Colloquium T. J. Wooler's "Black Dwarf" and Its Dangerous Japanese Correspondence: Defining Britishness in Post-1815 Radical Culture Speaker: Ms. Jing-Huey Hwang (DFLL Part time Lecturer) 演講人：臺大外文系黃淨慧兼任講師 Moderator: Dr. Hsin-ying Li (DFLL Associate Professor) 主持人：臺大外文系李欣穎副教授 Time: 2:00 ~ 3:30 pm, Wednesday, December 24, 2008 時間：2008年12月24日週三下午2:00-3:30 Venue: DFLL New Conference Room, Gallery of NTU History (Old Main Library) 地點：臺大校史館（舊總圖）一樓外文系新會議室 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abstract: Thomas Jonathan Wooler's Black Dwarf, A London Weekly Publication (1817-24) was one of the most influential radical journals in post-1815 Britain. While a few fine studies have examined the various rhetorical techniques of the Black Dwarf in relation to the dynamics of contemporary political debates, the column featuring the Black Dwarf's spurious letters to his fictional correspondent 'the Yellow Bonze at Japan' – which makes up a major section of the journal – has only received passing references in the existing scholarship. This paper draws attention to the significance of the established vocabulary of 'Oriental despotism' and the literary convention of pseudo-Oriental correspondence in these letters of the Black Dwarf. As the threat of the government's prosecution against seditious writing remained material throughout the duration of Wooler's journal, the analogy between Japan and Britain functions as oblique criticism of the ministry whose high-handed measures against the supporters of parliamentary reform seem despotic and therefore un-British. This study will also point out that, though regions in the East were often invoked interchangeably at the time, Japan and China are differentiated from Muslim countries in the Black Dwarf, and the narrative authority of Wooler's Japanese Bonze differs from that of a Persian in Thomas Moore's best-selling reformist Twopenny Post-Bag (1813). Wooler avails himself of the foreign commentator's impartiality and the pretext of informing home correspondent the occurrences of the trip so as to comment on controversial issues of his day. While the juxtaposition of the supposed British freedom and Oriental despotism highlights the contingency of these presumably defining characteristics of civilisation, this paper suggests that changes in the larger contexts of literary taste for ethnographical authenticity and the relative strengths of Britain and Eastern nations limit the application of such a rhetorical strategy. Nevertheless, even though Wooler's imaginary Japan never serves as a positive alternative to British institutions as China sometimes did in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century British narratives, and Wooler does little more than appropriating or referring to a nominally Japanese perspective, the Japanese correspondence of the Black Dwarf helps to interrogate what has been taken for granted as British and to articulate central concerns of the radicals. 外文系系辦 --

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